The Bender of White Fire
by Michael Ross
Summary: A story about twin boys, born to a small Earth Kingdom village, who are separated in their youth and meet again in their adulthood.
1. Chapter 1

"Bending. The art which lies between birthright and belief, a sacred and mystical practice which, to many, is an honor to be cherished. The talent of manipulating nature; to wield fire, to move earth, to direct water, and to control the air which we breathe.

"The world is divided by these four elements, joined and mediated by the Avatar, who is the Spirit. In a world of harmony, the Avatar assures that all citizens of all nations are accepted wherever and whenever, but even the Avatar is biased against the Fire Nation these days. One hundred years ago, they began their conquest of the world, decimating first the Air Nomads. It was a hard battle, and they moved onto the Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom, who at times collaborated to protect each other. Thus, the North Pole lasted throughout the entire war, and Ba Sing Se was only under Fire Nation control for one season.

"The practitioners of each art can generally be characterized by the style of bending. Airbenders, or at least the last Airbender, use negative jing to evade attacks and often are calm and hard to anger, seeking to resolve conflicts without harm. Waterbenders redirect the attack, a degree between negative and neutral jing, and thus try to resolve conflicts as a balance between avoidance and dismissal. Earthbenders intercept the attack and stress neutral jing, facing the problem head on when the timing is perfect. Firebenders practice positive jing, which is the attack. They are angry and tend to respond out of proportion."

The man who spoke looked young, too young for the immense hatred which burned in his eyes. He wore no armor to signify which nation he belonged to, leaving his torso bare and wearing neutral brown pants. He placed his hand on the shoulder of the young man tied to a metal chair, smelted carefully to remove any impurities of the Earth, stripped down to the customary undergarments of the Earth Tribe as to assure that he was not keeping any rock hidden for his escape. "But you knew all that. We are both very aware of the differences between us."

For one brief moment, the man's eyes softened. "May I tell you a story?"

* * *

The city of Nionii existed several hundred miles to the north of Omashu, just where the mountainous range came to an end. Its settlers were prominent Earth Kingdom families who founded the city as an economic enterprise, meaning for it to become a mecca to desert wanderers, but when the plans proved unsuccessful the rich families moved back, and the descendents of the servants who helped settle the city lived a quiet, peaceful life. There were indeed successful merchants living in the city, but their profits were nowhere near high enough for the Earth Kingdom investors to take notice.

Just before sunrise, a woman's pained screams woke every person in the village, though it was a sound that all of them had heard and many of the women had made. Kai, married to the craftsman Moku, screamed and pounded at the people around her as knowledgeable women and their apprentices worked to deliver the two babies she carried inside of her. Though they had been woken up prematurely, the villagers breathed relief as they lay in bed; Kai was a kind woman at heart, an outsider to their village who married in, but was never known to keep her temper particularly well. As her pregnancy stretched on in months and her belly grew too large for her to walk with, the agony of the fully-grown infants inside of her stretched the patience of her neighbors. Hopefully, now that she was about to experience raising children, instead of just growing them, her moods would stabilize.

Several hours later, as the men and women worked in their respective trades, the optimistic outlook they'd had at dawn had vanished as Kai's screams had only become louder, and several parents were forced to explain to their children colorful new words and why they should never say them.

"Get these children out of me!" Kai screamed. Moku continually brought her water and cool cloths for her forehead, but in her blind pain she batted away at even him. They had given her large rocks to squeeze; originally she had held her husband's hand, as was typical in such situations, but her powerful grip bruised each of his hands. Moku, in addition to being a craftsman, was a hulking and burly man, the most skilled Earthbender in the village. Though he had spent many years honing his body with the raw, solid power of earth, he did not seem particularly emasculated by his injured hands.

Near sundown, just when a coup was beginning to form, the screams suddenly stopped. The villagers ran to the adobe house, sure that something was wrong, but were met with the massive form of Moku, beaming with unrestricted pride as he held a healthy, beautiful son in each arm. They peeked inside to see Kai resting, clothing, hair, and bedsheets completely soaked through with sweat, with an exhausted but happy look on her face.

Moku passed the twin boys around, identical in their chubby arms and legs, the thick hair atop their heads, and everything else. He could only stand being parted with his sons for a few moments before he scooped them back up and began to nuzzle them again, too filled with the miracle he'd spent a day helping to bring into the world. After two hours, he brought them inside and passed them to their mother, clean from the bath she had begged for, covered in sweat and the natural, if disgusting, fluids of childbirth. She was still weak from the birth; her midwives were amazed that she made through it at all and understood the pain she had verbally expressed. Kai was a petite woman, at least a foot and a half shorter than her giant of a husband and weighing no more than an adolescent girl. Birthing one child of that size would have been difficult for her slender frame, but she was bedridden for months with two of them and the fact that they came out naturally would become the inspiration for mothers in the years to come.

Moku and the birthing apprentices placed the children gingerly into her arms, and it seemed that this was the only thing that could have broadened Moku's smile. "What are their names?" he asked.

The matriarch of the village, also the wisest and most experienced midwife, took in a sharp breath. "You mean you haven't named the children?"

The large man nodded his head. "In the village where Kai was born, it was considered bad luck to name the children before their parents could look upon their faces, just as it is considered bad luck here to wait until birth."

"But still, do you not…"

"No, Josan. Our marriage is about compromise. She gave up many things to move here with me, and forgoing our silly tradition about baby names is nothing compared to that."

Speaking that way to an Elder, especially the Matriarch, was unheard of in the village. There was no formal punishment, but it could easily mean trouble for the family of the offender. However, Moku was arguably just as important in the hierarchy as she was; he was the elected leader of the Craftsman's Guild and second-in-command of the militia, overseeing the Earthbending training of all warriors. He did not share her birthright, but he'd earned respect just the same.

"Very well," Josan said. In addition to her duties as the head midwife, she was a diplomat who kept the peace within and outside of their village. She turned around, and ushered for her apprentices and the townspeople to leave. "Let us give this new family some space. This will be the first of many long nights for them." They all laughed quietly and went home to their respective beds.

Once the house had cleared out, Moku took the children back, tucking them into the twin slings that had been sewn for them as a gift. Sleep was quickly coming over her, so he quickly asked, "What are their names?"

She pointed first to the child on the left. "He is Hidaki, for my uncle." Then she pointed to the child on the right. "And he is Kisuke, for your father."

He bent over the bed and kissed her forehead. "Rest, Kin. I will spend tonight in the infants' room."

"I wish I could join you."

His hearty frame shook with a laugh. "This will be the only night of sleep either of us will get for some time. Be selfish while you can."

"I love…" she began to say, before her eyelids closed and she sank deeply into their mat. He pulled the sheets around her shoulders and kissed her one more time that night. "I love you too."

That night, his sons proved as strong as he could have ever hoped them to be. Though the night was cold, they barely shivered and Moku got them extra blankets only when his thick skin finally noticed the fall air around them. They slept soundly and woke only when they were hungry. Kin awoke angrily as she usually did when roused after only a few hours, but her mood turned around when she fed her children for the first time.

The next day, Moku took his first day off from his work and his official duties ever to sleep while Kin began her first day of motherhood. Josan had made the arrangements for her to take four months off to devote herself solely to childcare; in two months, she would decide if she wanted to be a caregiver full-time or wished to return to the workforce. If she decided to work again, full or part-time, Josan would help her find daytime childcare. If not, things would continue as they were. After that date, as Josan and her staff were extremely busy women, she would be placed on the end of the waiting list for daytime childcare; most children grew up and could take care of themselves during the day before they ever approached the top of the list.

Though their village was not extremely poor, it did not have a particularly well-developed agricultural system; more than half of its workforce was devoted to farming. Earthbending made growing crops easier; entire fields could be stripped of rocks and plowed in minutes. However, there were still those who had to run the dairy, raise livestock for slaughter, fish, and perform every other job involved. Even group childcare was hard to find for this reason; there were very few people to spare for such jobs.

Kin was lucky; when she had first come to the village, she amazed the villagers with an advanced education. They were not exactly country bumpkin, but her mastery of foreign literature and especially advanced mathematics were impossible to find in the village. She split her time between teaching advanced classes and acting as the village's only accountant. Insignificant as Nionii might have been to powerful investors, they still had to pay taxes to the Earth King like all citizens.


	2. Chapter 2

By the time they were five, the twins were on their way to becoming the men that Moku knew they would be. They were strong, athletic, and competitive, usually acting as opposing captains in the games of the village children. The twins had different skills; Hidaki usually took his teams on the offensive while Kisuke led a defensive game, though at their tender age luck was often important.

"Not fair!" Hidaki said, calling a time-out and sending his team to discuss strategy, which involved poking a beetle with a stick. "You bended!"

They'd been playing a game in a large square court, with two hoops suspended by rafters. They had a ball stitched together from leather, and to score, the last two players to touch the ball had to be from the same team, kicking it to make it ricochet into one of the two hoops. Hidaki had passed the ball to Teki, and it should have been a perfect shot. However, his sharp eyes caught a disturbance in the ground; the ground swelled just enough to make Teki miss the receive and the ball to roll out of bounds.

At their age, the knowledge of Earthbending was highly unusual. Every nation, and sometimes each city, had a different view on the education of the arts. Fire Nation royals were taught essentially from birth, and regular citizens began formal education around the age of ten, normally. At the North Pole, men began to learn fighting techniques around the age of fourteen, and the most apt young women began learning healing at twelve. Little was known of the South Pole. The Air Monks, a hundred years prior, instructed infants and toddlers in the bending arts to encourage play and imagination in children. Earth Kingdom citizens varied the most; in Nionii, basic education began at age eleven, unless a warrior's parents chose to begin their teachings early.

Moku had given his sons some rudimentary lessons in Earthbending. For all their similar talents, however, only Kisuke had been able to move any Earth. It was rare for a five-year old to display talent in the raw-force oriented nature of that art, but it surprised everyone that Hidaki, typically the more aggressive of the two, had not progressed at all. At age 5, rumors were already spreading that Hidaki didn't have any bending talent at all.

"You bended, that's cheating!" As soon as Kisuke's team lined up to support their captain, Hidaki's team faced off too, until the angry adolescent stares began to look more like rival gangs about to battle.

"I didn't cheat. You just can't kick."

"I saw you Earthbend. You stamped your foot down and brought your hand up, and the ball moved. It was gung gee fook fu kuen!"

Kisuke laughed; his precocious team did as well. "Just because you can't bend doesn't mean I'm cheating."

Only half a second after Kisuke finished speaking did he learn that just because Hidaki couldn't Earthbend like he could, didn't mean that he didn't know the style. Even though he didn't launch any rocks through the air, he did ram his fist into his twin brother's face. Before Kisuke could give the order, both sides fought full-out.

Though they were in the center of town, there were no adults around to catch them. Their brawl was short-lived, as most of them were only five years old and their attention spans couldn't hold the anger for long. All of them were bruised and a few were bloody, but they took their blows as their fathers had taught them, like men. They surreptitiously washed the blood off, ditched the red stained towels at the bottom of a trash can, and told their mothers that their scrapes came from ordinary rough-housing. Their fathers, however, slid them a small cup of wine under the table with a hearty wink for a day well-spent.

Building wasn't as difficult in Earth Kingdom societies as it was in the other nations. Airbenders, long ago, carved their dwelling out of rocks by channeling the wind to burrow out tunnels just as happened naturally; but the process still took months. Conventional shelters were more common. The Fire Nation built out of metal whenever they could, metal being the unbendable pride of the Fire Nation, but the smelting process was long and laboring. In smaller Earth Kingdom villages, where they had no need for grand palaces, building was a simple matter of bending more dirt from the ground and solidifying it.

When they were born, Hidaki and Kisuke shared a room, but as they began to grow and demand more space, Moku had bended an extra room onto their dwelling. It was in his private room that Hidaki sulked in when Moku walked in straight through the wall.

"What's the matter?" The father asked, sitting down on the bed that Kai insisted they buy. Moku and Kisuke, as Earthbenders, were strangely comfortable sleeping on solid ground, but Kai and Hidaki would wake up with back problems everyday. Moku slept in the same bed as Kai, because it was where marital bliss happened, and Hidaki had a small bed in his room where Kisuke liked to sleep sprawled on his back in the center of the floor. "From what I hear, you won the fight today."

Hidaki sighed and got up from the bed, crossing the room to his bookshelf. Thanks to his mother, their household had more books than any other house in the village, and usually when his brother held his bending ability over his head, Hidaki produced the fact that he was the more talented academian. "I won because Kisuke can't bend very well yet," he said. "What about when he's better? When all the other kids can bend too?"

Shaking his large, shaggy head, Moku clapped a heavy hand on his son's shoulder. "You'll learn to bend one day. I didn't learn rudimentary Earthbending until I was eleven and started learning with everybody else, but I tried so much before that. Your brother is just very lucky, but you're lucky too. You're both already more than I ever could have hoped for."

"He'll always be ahead of me though."

His father laughed. "You don't even believe that. You know that you're both too competitive; it won't matter when you started, you'll each struggle to catch up with each other."

The look on his son's face was unconvincing. "If you're that worried, why don't you practice harder?"

Hidaki sighed, and suddenly his face grew intense and he flawlessly performed every move in the beginner's set that his father had taught them. "I didn't move a pebble."

Though he couldn't show it, Moku was impressed; Kisuke's form was sloppier, less refined, yet he was already adept at bending. For his other son to display such mastery of movement and still know nothing…perhaps both of their worst fears were confirmed. The tiniest speck of doubt escaped his mind, and he knew that his son saw it, but continued on. "Bending isn't all about form. I could see you were concentrating, but were you feeling the earth beneath your feet?" Moku stared at a spot on the ground between them. "Form isn't even necessary," he said, and tilted his head back sharply; without moving his body at all, a small boulder suddenly shot up from the ground and hovered between them. "The Earthbending style was developed to help benders channel their talents and energies effectively into the movement of our element. But any movement," he paused, and this time wagged his finger, breaking the boulder up into little chunks that fell seamlessly back into the ground, "with the proper feeling can inspire the element to bend to our will."

"But I can't feel the earth at all!" Hidaki jumped up and down. "Dirt feels like sand, sand feels like stone. There's no difference to me; I can't feel vibrations or walk around with my eyes closed."

Again, a speck of doubt. "Keep practicing, I know you'll do it."

* * *

At age eight, Kisuke was accepted into Moku's beginning-level class with all of the village's eleven year olds; though Hidaki was displaying mastery of form far beyond any of the graduated benders, he had yet to move a single pebble. He was brilliant as a regular martial artist; he could break a board two-inches thick and win a duel against less talented Earthbenders, but Kisuke's progress was beginning to fulfill the prophecy that he laid out so many years before. His forms were excellent, not mastered, but impressive nonetheless, and he rose through the ranks faster than any student before him, even his own father.

All of the academic training of the village youngsters were suspended while Earthbending classes were in session, so Hidaki sat at home with Kai when the sun was halfway to the mountains, and would be there with her when it had set. In the three years since his brother had first bended, he'd grown more and more defensive and moody, skulking away from celebrations, parties, and often his own family, as far as the Earthbenders were involved. But his mother was untalented, just as he, and made up for it by being a genius.

Kai's mathematical skills were wasted on tax accounting, but it was one of the most important jobs in the village. She tried hosting workshops and seminars, to help people get a grasp on the income system, but most of them didn't keep detailed records of their monetary flux. They kept careful track of their crops, inventory, and resources, but how much all of that cost seemed to constantly escape them. Kai analyzed market force trends and studied inflation, along with a few other tricks, to figure out exactly how much her neighbors were making to ensure that the Earth King got every cent the government assured them he deserved.

Hidaki rested his head on his hands as he boredly watched his mother scratch out equations and prepare for the tax season ahead of them; they were supposed to pay taxes quarterly, but her knowledge extended into law and she found an exclusion allowing secluded areas, such as Nionii, to file paperwork allowing them to pay annually. As Ba Sing Se was a great lover of rules, regulations, and paperwork, they were more than delighted to allow the village an annual season.

"Hidaki!" she instructed sharply, and her son jerked up. "What is the answer?"

He stammered for as long as he possibly could, then read the first equation he saw on the table.

"I asked you that same question half an hour ago, when you were actually paying attention, and you got it right without having to think about it." Her tone was more heavy than her husband's; she had fire in her eyes when it came to matters as serious as her son's education. "Why are you so upset? You love math."

He leaned back in his chair and dared cast his mother a deviant eye. "I don't like math, I'm just good at it. This," he rustled the paper on the table, "is the only thing I'm good at. Everybody loves Kisuke because he's so great at Earthbending. Have you seen his style? It's so lazy."

"You will not beseech your brother for his talent. He doesn't complain that you're a level ahead of him in school."

Though she was constantly raising the bar, becoming more and more overbearing with each second, Hidaki had the same fire to match that his father nor brother possessed. "That's because school doesn't really matter. Not out here, not in Nionii. Farming and fighting matter here."

"Well then maybe I shouldn't be letting you spend all this time inside, reading books and helping me with finances. You're old enough to start working in the fields."

"Fine," he said, and shoved all the papers away from him. "If I can grow wheat, maybe people won't laugh at me for being the runt twin."

Kai lost all of her intensity in that moment, watching her son tremble with the weight that his very being placed on him, and stood slowly from the table. She held her arms out, to embrace him and try to take his pain away, but he backed up. "I'm going to go for a walk," he said, and ripped open the door.

During practice, Kisuke was bringing up walls of earth to block the boulders shot at him by his sparring partner. His partner was supposed to fire ten volleys, then they were to flatten their section of the field together and switch positions. Almost without effort, Kisuke brought up nine rock walls, but the last time simply held up a hand and caught the boulder, larger than his head, and yawned widely.

"Kisuke!" Moku barked sharply, so loudly that several of the other students lost concentration and were smacked in the head by large boulders. "Stop showing off, that isn't the exercise."

With a wide grin, Kisuke spun the ball on his fingertip, then pulled his hand away entirely to watch the ball spin in midair, unattended, for several seconds before Moku snapped his fingers and it blew apart into dust right in his son's face. "Ten laps around the field."

His grin entirely gone, Kisuke made the slightest of noises. "Thirty laps. Go."

He grumbled and shuffled off to begin running, and Moku turned to the rest of them. "Earthbending isn't as easy as the other bending arts. It requires constant attention and extreme self-discipline, watching and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Goofing off—faster!—" Moku suddenly interrupted, and Kisuke picked up the pace, "and overconfidence can cost you the entire fight."

Behind his father's back, Kisuke mouthed his words with a sneer, making faces at his fellow students until he passed into his father's field of vision, where he gained a look of great concentration and pushed harder to complete the lap. Why was he being blamed for being so talented? The lesson was too easy for him; bringing up defensive walls was kids stuff. Catching a boulder hurdled at his head with one hand, that was bending talent. He had to be more intensely rooted to the ground than he did in the intended exercise, and his father hadn't even taught them a proper technique for catching boulders. As far as he knew, there wasn't one; he'd improvised and hadn't budged.

Earthbenders could use their skill to run faster, by shifting the ground underneath them in a forward direction. Kisuke knew, that even though the technique was way too advanced for him to know, that his father would be mad if he used it. If his brother had managed to do it, their father would have cried with excitement and thrown a party.

Even without bending, he finished the thirty laps before his father could finish explaining the last exercise. He rejoined the group with a slight look of pride, enough to annoy his father but not enough to earn another lap. "But even still," Moku bore on, "improvisation can be key, and the safest place to do that is in a sparring match. New techniques are developed every day, and if and when the Fire Nation marches in here all of us might have to be creative if we want to defend our city. So break up into partners, different than your partners last time, and—" he looked directly at Kisuke, "—feel free to use whatever comes to mind."

Kisuke broke out into a grin; his father could ride him hard sometimes, but when he had to face the truth he treated all of his students the same, or roughly so. Though Moku was sensitive about Hidaki's lack of bending ability, he was much more strict when Hidaki mouthed off to their parents or any of the village's elders. Except Josan, she and Moku had never gotten along.

He faced his opponent, a fourteen year old named Wen. He chose him because Wen was the best in their group, aside from him; it would make testing his new technique all the harder, which would make his inevitable success all the more rewarding. Three months prior, Kai had returned from a trip to Omashu, to speak with a local consulate about the current welfare reform legislation. She returned with tales of a visiting group of Waterbenders from the North Pole, on their way to visit the leader of the Dai Lee, the military wing of the Earth Kingdom. As part of a goodwill offering to the community, they put on a public showcase of their bending talents. Obtaining Waterbender secrets was a hard task, but she managed to convince their leader to pen one technique as a souvenir: "The Water Whip." Ever since Kisuke had read it, he had been dying to try out an earth-based version of it.

From a nearby rooftop, sitting perfectly still so that he made no vibration, Hidaki watched his brother adapt the Waterbender techniques to his own whim. He had read the scroll too; Kisuke's personal reflection on the Earthbender techniques didn't allow for such a straight translation. Obviously Waterbending was about redirecting the flow of energy, but Kisuke had no concept of that. The Water Whip took the motion of flowing water and narrowed it, solidifying the surface tension to knock over or sting opponents with the last of its momentum. For a brief moment, he considered entering the field to pass advice on to his brother, but he knew it would end badly.

It was extremely poor etiquette to make fun of a person with no bending ability, but Hidaki was one of two children that didn't possess Earthbending talent. They didn't have to make fun of him; the de facto segregation was enough. Their games had moved from war strategy to bending strategy; they couldn't perform anywhere near the level of skill that Kisuke could, but despite his toughness only they could survive being hit with a massive piece of earth, with intercepting a ball made of rock and kicking it with their bare feet. Kisuke had begun to secretly pass his training to his companions; its clear danger made it taboo, but it seemed that he was a capable and responsible teacher, only passing along refined forms of basic techniques. The techniques were still fundamentally flawed, but better than they would have done alone.

For all intents and purposes, despite his parents' status in their microcosm, Hidaki was low on the social order. For a non-bender to correct a prodigy on his form was laughable, and the ramifications were intense.

He considered going back to their house, to sit in his room and read, or grudgingly go back to his lessons. When he was honest with himself, he liked the lessons; he took to mathematics and literature easily. It was hard to get out of Nionii; though he was receiving an excellent education, he didn't have a degree to work in one of the larger Earth Kingdom cities. He could travel to Omashu whenever he wanted, but he had no business staying there. If he did, he would only be qualified to become a waiter, or a laborer, or a janitor. Even if he had to watch his twin take his father's crown, it was better than not accepting his mother's.

But he couldn't go back home; hopefully his mother was still feeling guilty, and that consoled him. He couldn't feel good about it if he was actually watching her melancholy.

Kisuke was losing the battle. That happened often, when he was training like this, trying to figure out appropriate counters with new material, often completely improvised. He could raise the earth from the ground in the appropriate fashion, but every time he tried to throw it or control it, they dropped back to the ground and he took a blow from Wen.

His father called a break just as he gave up and mimicked his father's earlier move, reducing Wen's last attack to dust. He blew the dirt that he'd accumulated off and began to stretch, keeping himself limber. Earthbending was a style of constant vigilance; though his father was exceedingly kind in his lessons like everyday life, he sometimes attacked right after he blew the whistle for practice to end, or just as someone walked into the training arena. Earthbenders were primed and ready at all times, whether they wanted to be or not.

Kisuke grabbed his shins and bent down, stretching out his calves and lower back; looking between his legs, he thought he caught a glimpse of himself for just a moment. He whirled around; practices were closed for reasons of safety, but that wasn't his objection. Hidaki was not there when he came around, but Kisuke was sure he was watching.

A few other students were talking to Moku, so the break would continue for at least ten more minutes. He ran over and summoned the earth beneath him, to launch him onto the rooftop, but his brother was no longer there. The arena was on the edge of the town, and beyond that were fields of flowers, then dirt, then the mountains. Hundreds of miles beyond those was Omashu.

He narrowed his eyes and scanned for his brother; just as he thought he saw the flash of an arm, he was struck in the back by an earthen projectile. He tumbled down the roof and landed, dazed, in a pile below. "Break is over!" Moku shouted.


End file.
